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Preservation New Jersey
Preservation New Jersey (PNJ) is a state wide non-profit organization that advocates for and promotes historic preservation. They wanted their new site to look clean and inviting, and also to offer a lot of information for a broad audience. They wanted to celebrate the great old buildings and neighborhoods that make places all over New Jersey unique and livable, but we had to build in the group’s technical information, events announcements and networking content as well.
It is a large scale website with over 100 weblogs and 15 field groups. Yet, the functionality of the back-end is very intuitive due to our use of consistent and semantically-meaningful names for each section on the website. Our preferred WYSIWYG extension for ExpressionEngine is MX Universal Editor. It works really well with FieldFrame and TinyMCE.
Almost everything on the website is driven by weblogs and is customizable by the client. For instance, adding new photos to the fancy Javascript slideshow on the homepage is as simple as creating a new entry with a path to the photo and a photo caption.
We have also provided the ability for the users of the website to submit relevant news and events by using a guest login. This was achieved by using SAEF (Stand-alone Entry Form). These submissions are logged as entries in ExpressionEngine, but do not go live immediately on the website. We have done this to give our client a chance to review the submissions. Only after approval are the entries made live, simply by changing the status of the entry from Closed to Open. Logout Redirect (v.1.2) plugin is used to redirect a user to a page of our choosing upon logging out of the EE system.
One section of the site highlights the Building Industry Network (BIN), a group of professionals involved in the preservation or development of older properties. The weblog for this page has custom fields for the business details and contact information of the company. For BIN membership, we have built the shopping cart in ExpressionEngine using Shopping Cart Functions (v.1.0) plugin, and integrated the checkout with Paypal.
10 Most Endangered Sites is a micro-site of the main PNJ site. This list rallies support for important character-defining landmarks and historic places that teeter on the brink of extinction. The listing is viewable by year, by name, or by county. We have written custom SQL queries to achieve these categorizations using the ExpressionEngine Query Module. Of course, the person doing maintenance doesn’t need to know HTML or SQL. They just need to publish a new entry for a endangered site, select the year and other site related details. The design and listing of sites takes care of itself.
Other Add-ons
MX Universal Editor (v.1.0.2)
LG Add Sitename (v.1.2.0)
Logout Redirect (v.1.2)
Shopping Cart Functions (v.1.0)
Clone Entries (v.1.1)
Company: Tactile Design Group
Contact: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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08/27 at 10:54 AM
As Executive Director of Preservation New Jersey, a nonprofit with just three staffers, I can attest to the amazing ease with which we non-techies are able to make changes and additions to our beautiful website. Traffic to the new site has grown by a factor of three, and our members, constituents and clients are highly complimentary. We’re EE fans, and certainly the biggest fans of Tactile Design Group! Thanks.
